Rival Poet

The Rival Poet is one of several characters, either fictional or real persons, featured in William Shakespeare's sonnets. The sonnets most commonly identified as the Rival Poet group exist within the Fair Youth group in sonnets 78–86. Several theories about these characters, the Rival Poet included, have been expounded, and scholarly debate continues to put forward both conflicting and compelling arguments. In the context of these theories, the speaker of the poem sees the Rival Poet as a competitor for fame, wealth and patronage.

Among others, George Chapman, Christopher Marlowe, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Barnabe Barnes, Gervase Markham, and Richard Barnfield have been proposed as identities for the Rival Poet.

Chapman was a prominent poet and translator of Homer. Scholars speculate that Shakespeare was familiar with his work, having read part of his translation of the Iliad for his own Troilus and Cressida, a dramatic reworking of Chaucer's epic poem. Chapman wrote Ovid's Banquet Of Sense, a metaphysical poem seen as a response to the erotic Venus and Adonis, which incidentally features Shakespeare's most quoted poet, Ovid. In Shakespeare and the Rival Poet, Acheson conjectures that Chapman's erotic poems were written with a view to gaining Southampton's patronage. The moral tone of Ovid's Banquet of Sense eschews the amatory tone of Shakespeare's, and seeks to instill spiritual seriousness in a work that takes the five senses as its Conceits. Chapman's patrons also moved in the same circles as Shakespeare's; thus Shakespeare may have felt insecure about the stability of his own income versus a talented rival. Chapman was both then and now regarded as being particularly erudite, whereas, as Ben Jonson writes, Shakespeare had "small Latine and lesse Greeke.". The latest advocate for Chapman as the rival poet is Evert Sprinchorn (2008).

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